JENKINS: Only-child myth slips into Poway threat case

One of the most stubborn prejudices about human behavior surfaced at the very end of a North County crime story that ran online Sunday and Monday morning in print editions.

As you know, a Poway seventh-grader allegedly sent an email to a school administrator vowing to kill a teacher and “at least” 23 fellow students. Authorities traced the threat to the boy’s computer and swooped in Saturday evening.

The legitimacy of the alleged threat was heightened by the fact that the boy’s father owns a small arsenal of weapons, including an M-16.

Of course, it’s standard police procedure to parcel out the bare minimum of facts about a juvenile suspect. As a compassionate rule, minors are sheltered from media exposure that could disfigure their lives.

Maybe it’s a reflection of my own sensitivity on the subject, but one domestic detail, reported at the end of the U-T San Diego story, struck me as remarkably out of step with what we know, or should know, about children.

As is routine, the Sheriff’s Department released facts that would inform the public about the where, what and when of the alleged crime, but the “who” was handled with customary discretion.

Here’s what was deemed too essential not to release:

• Gender: History aside, the odds of the suspect being a girl are 50-50. However, a male suspect was taken into custody for medical evaluation.

Brenda Spencer may have shot her way into infamy on a Monday in 1979, but the Sheriff’s Department had no qualms about revealing that the suspect belongs to the typically more violent sex.

• Age and Grade: The focus of police investigation will no doubt be the suspect’s teachers and classmates. Within the Twin Peaks school community, it’s probably well-known who the suspect is. (Whose seventh-grade desk is empty?)

Speculation may run wild about the suspect’s mental state, but his age and grade are dispassionate facts that cannot be distorted in the press. Joe Friday would approve of this basic disclosure.

So far so good. I was reading the story, making mental notes of what gaps might be filled in by follow-up stories. We may never get a complete psychological portrait of the preteen suspect, but in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, we’re looking for any clues as to why some young men go off the deep end — and take innocents with them.

Then, in the penultimate paragraph, I was brought up short by this sentence:

“Few details were released about the boy other than his grade level, age and the fact that he is an only child.”

That last bit of information, disclosed by an officer while answering a question at a news conference, leapt off the page.

Of all the freighted facts the Sheriff’s Department could have released — ethnicity of the family, the boy’s psychological history, marriage history of parents, and so on — authorities allowed that the suspect is a single child.

On a subtextual level, the sentence reads: “Few details were released about the boy other than his grade level, age and the fact that he is very likely a lonely, selfish child prone to instability.”

You think I’m overreacting? As the parent of an only child (and the son of a mother who was an only child), I’m acutely aware of the tradition of singling out only children as inherently damaged. One in five households today have single children, but a deeply ingrained stigma persists.

One of the most influential child psychologists of the 1890s, Granville Hall, proclaimed: “Being an only child is a disease in itself.”

Though study after study has debunked the pervasive widely held view that only children are often maladjusted, the cultural view persists that single children are in some way peculiar, misfit loners in the making.

In a comprehensive story in a 2010 edition of Time magazine, Lauren Sandler called this cultural bias, which is an undeniable thread of our religious, economic and biological ancestry, a “century-old public-relations issue.”

In reality, single children in today’s world tend to do better in school than children with siblings. Other than that, there’s no way to tell children apart by the number of brothers and sisters they have, or don’t have. That’s social science, not myth.

In a comprehensive profile, the suspect’s family structure would, of course, be fitting. But as a single piece of information doled out to fill a virtual news vacuum, this “fact” takes on way too much importance.

It breathes life into a bigoted beast that should have been put to rest long ago.